The Real Origin of ‘Supercalifragilisticexpialidocious’

The word ‘Supercalifragilisticexpialidocious’ appeared before Mary Poppins

For many people, supercalifragilisticexpialidocious and the 1964 movie Mary Poppins are inextricably linked. Indeed, it was this movie that popularized the word.

In Mary Poppins supercalifragilisticexpialidocious is said to be simply a word used as “something to say when you have nothing to say,” but the mouthful of nonsensical syllables certainly has brought cheer to audiences for decades. That cheer has inspired people to use it.

The earliest known written record of a variant is for supercaliflawjalisticexpialidoshus from an “A-muse-ings” column by Helen Herman in The Syracuse Daily Orange (Syracuse University), March 10, 1931. The columnist muses about her made-up word, describing it as including “all words in the category of something wonderful” and “though rather long and tiring before one reaches its conclusion, … once you arrive at the end, you have said in one word what it would ordinarily take four paragraphs to explain.”

Richard and Robert Sherman, songwriters, have explained the word as originating in the same way they, like many others, used to make up humorously big, nonsensical words as children.

Remember when we used to make up the big double-talk words, we could make a big obnoxious word up for the kids and that’s where it started. “Obnoxious” is an ugly word so we said “atrocious,” that’s very British. We started with “atrocious” and then you can sound smart and be precocious. We had “precocious” and “atrocious” and we wanted something super colossal and that’s corny, so we took “super” and did double-talk to get “califragilistic” which means nothing, it just came out that way.

Richard and Robert Sherman

Coincidentally, there was also a song called Supercalafajalistickespeealadojus that was written in 1949, and the authors of the song brought a suit against the Sherman brothers for copyright infringement. In the end, the court decided in the Shermans’ favor because, among other things, affidavits were produced that claimed that variants of the word were known many years prior to 1949, making the plaintiffs’ claim unfounded.

People also began to use a shortened adjective form, supercalifragilistic, as well as the adverbial supercalifragilistically. These forms don’t appear often, but when they do, they mean something along the lines of “wonderful” or “amazing,”

Merriam-Webster

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